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What is theft? To me this is taking something that doesn’t belong to you in a manner that causes harm or loss to another party.

Is copying theft? I think it can be, definately. Copying a Movie is theft, it affects the people that own the movie, they lose revenue. A lot of revenue.

Since the dawn of the internet we have smashed head first into the information age. Freedom of information means that normal have free access to more information than they ever have in history, we are now asking the question ‘should they have free access to this information’ is it everyones right to have free access to all information, does this cause loss to the people that created the information or other media that is being freely distributed. I personally think stuff should only be made available for free if the person who created it decides that is ok.

Obviously this is going to be hard if the creator is dead and some evil faceless corporation owns the copyright….

EXAMPLE

Many people watch Movies and TV shows online these days. Some people ‘stream’ movies, ie they watch a movie online on a service similar to Youtube. Some people will actually download a movie, either directly from a website or through a technology such as Torrenting, Torrenting is a peer to peer file sharing protocol that has no central server. It is extremely efficient and extremely hard for copyright owners to stop.

So my question, From a ‘theft’ point of view which is worse:

Stream a movie?
Direct download a movie?
Download a movie using filesharing technology?

Its an interesting question, it can be made more interesting by adding some detail to the options:

You want to watch the movie twice;
You configure your filesharing software to download only and not to upload any data, effectively meaning you don’t ‘share’ – you just take.

In my opinion the worst option is to stream the movie twice, here you are effectively downloading the movie two times (you could argue that not recording it, but as far as te owner is concerned maybe you are recording), with the other options you only make one download the can watch it multiple times.

Its an interesting argument, I don’t know what the answer is, maybe the lawyers can fight over it…. they love to try and make sense of obscure things…. like this